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Marketing is quite powerful and can impact us so much that we take many decisions based on the biased knowledge we have been imparted with. A recent experience with diet made me find a lot of loopholes exploited by the food industry and how it is the same product that had been there for many years with just some labels and some phrase changes. The biggest one is ‘No added sugar’. I have been believing this label until I found out the truth the hard way by cutting down on refined sugar in the diet. The number of sick days in a year went down considerably when the refined sugar in the diet came down to near zero.

spoon-2426623_640.jpgNo added sugar test

Take this following test – Try drinking fresh fruit juice without sugar, if you had been accustomed juice with sugar, this is unpalatable. But if you continue doing this for about a week your taste buds gets adjusted (caveat: Cut down sweets as well for that week to make it easily observable). The craving is hard to resist but promise yourselves a cheat treat if you pass one week.

By the end of a week or so the taste buds would have adjusted such that you begin to appreciate the subtle flavours and natural sweetness in the fruit juices. At this point of time, have two fruit juices of the same fruit side by side, one freshly prepared without sugar and another with a popular ‘No added sugar’ brand. Try the difference in the taste between them, see that the ‘No added sugar’ is significantly sweeter.

Why is that even with ‘No added sugar’ the branded drinks appear to be sweet? They have the following marketing tricks up their sleeve to substitute the word sugar. 

Dehydrated cane juice – Excuse me, isn’t that sugar. This was the most outrageous disguise I have found. Dehydrated cane juice is apparently not sugar for many people. This helps in adding the same amount of sugar as a sugared juice.

Some juice concentrate – This is pure genius, If you take apple juice, the label will often read ‘apple juice concentrate’ which helps to boost the per ml sugar content in the juice from the natural sugars in the fruit. We end up taking the same amount of sugar dose for a sugared juice which can be as high as two teaspoons for every 100 ml.

While a lot of people are trying to fight lifestyle and overconsumption related diseases there is a group of people who are working hard to trick people into making poor lifestyle choices. By doing so they are getting rewarded big at the expense of a unhealthy greater good. There is no big difference between an adulterer and these marketing gurus in the way they trick people to become wealthy.

There are a lot more, try to find what ‘No added preservatives‘ mean.

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I grew up in a social setting such that people once they earn a bad name, it was very difficult for them to recover and be back in full swing in the society. They have to rebuild their reputation either in a new place or the same place. Why did people try to associate themselves to a society?; because living together was easy and people helped each other a lot. If one falls sick, there were people who helped the family of the sick member to help them get back upto speed.

The labour market also did the same, governments across the globe came up with a lot of guidelines and laws to employ people such a way that there was social security in the form of sick time, paid leaves, bonuses, retirement funds, insurance and gratuities. We were able to advance as a society very well with these elaborate social structures, though someone can earn a lot of money doing small gigs many people avoided for the predictable life of an established company.

The lure of quick money is always there, especially when people are young the cash in hand always triumphs the long term survivability. People don’t see far ahead and not many are aware of saving for the rainy days when they are strong, healthy and ignorant. This makes a lot of people take up gigs to survive, a gig means – ‘a job, especially one that is temporary or that has an uncertain future’. Gigs offer a lot of money in hand for a given skill and experience to compensate for the uncertainty in the future.

The money component alone lures a lot of people into the gig economy where people with less or no skills can immediately get going and even get paid within a day of commencing work. The trouble with gig economy is

  1. There is no social net in it, sort of a medieval system where the strongest and fittest survive. If people fall sick or meet with an accident they lose all the savings, they earn no money during sick time and end up with a perpetual high cost debt.
  2. You can get away doing bad work or behaviour, and if things go bad you can leave a system and join something else fresh. If you did bad job in a food delivery system, you can leave and make money driving cars for sometime. Though the same is possible in full time employment, the scale at which this can happen is big in the gig economy and you can change identities easily or mask your past performance easily

It is hard to address point number 1, the gig economy is new and it is giving jobs to a lot of people and many of them get a lot of money which they think is disposable and end up spending it.

The second point is bad from a consumer point of view, if there is no repeat business from a customer there is no incentive to give good product or service. Uber does it through its rating system, but what if that person decides to create a new profile altogether after a messed up profile or switch gigs to something else.

In the short run it seems a lot of people will have new jobs and people in college can do part time work for delivery services, but in the long run it will tune people to settle for a life where they think that they can earn a lot than full time employment but companies will do all sorts of tactics like ‘bait and switch’ which has happened to cab drivers in India and keep them hooked on to the system even when it turns damaging for them.

There will be a point in time that governments have to intervene to make sure exploitation of its citizens don’t take place else our society will slowly regress into a medieval feudal system.

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We generally go by ‘The Spotlight Effect‘, we always think about what others think about and assume there is a greater chance of people noticing each and every thing we do and form an opinion about it. On the contrary, every one else has very less time to think about others and often think about themselves.

As observers we do notice a lot about things and give our opinions on it, but generally we lack the expertise and we are not the person in the arena facing the situation. Nevertheless our opinion as an observer gets voiced out, but most likely our opinions will change given our experience changes.

Change the tables around, the public has a lot of opinion on us. Some of us go way too much that we go about changing a lot about ourselves to make sure the public opinion about us is good, but the public opinion is fickle. People have a lot of other work to do and many at times they don’t even remember the opinion they had on us when we meet them.

Remember the story of the deaf frog who emerged victorious, learn to listen to yourself than spending energy on what others should think about you.